


Contact

by miomeinmio



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Man of Steel (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 08:50:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1184277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miomeinmio/pseuds/miomeinmio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>*THIS IS A FIC DUMP OF AN UNFINISHED WORK. Don't read if you want an ending. While this will be finished (the preference is towards soon, but hey, you know), this is currently my second unfinished work on AO3, and the other one will be finished first after I figure out the corner I managed to write myself into. So if you want to take a chance you may be waiting for a while.*</p><p>Jonathan Kent doesn't shoot the man who walks out of his cornfield, but it’s a near thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contact

**Author's Note:**

> There's a whole slew of crap at the end you can certainly choose not to read. You can also choose not to read this, because it's a bit spoiler-y, and I personally hate knowing what's going to happen in my fic before I read it. But for those who must know, read on.
> 
> The basic plot: Three people fall into a cornfield instead of one. This is a story of what might-have-beens, and all the problems associated with that. Happiness will be strikingly relative. All characterizations based off of the MOS movie, regardless of the fact that I do read and love the comics. All biographical 'facts' except the most established will be completely made up to fit with my purposes. And I mean. Let's face it - the Kents have been rewritten more times than is strictly necessary.

I.

 

Jonathan Kent doesn’t shoot the man who walks out of his cornfield, but it’s a near thing.

 

The yellow light had streaked through the sky, blasting down into the middle of his fields. It was only thanks to the common insomnia that had him up with a warm glass of milk in the kitchen that he saw it.

 

“Martha!” He had yelled. After a couple of shouts she had appeared on the staircase, hair sleep tousled and eyes blinking furiously. “Go stand by the phone, and if I don’t give you the all clear I want you to call the cops.”

 

God had blessed Martha Kent with a level head and two feet firmly planted on the ground, and Jonathan had never been more grateful for it than when she had padded warily over to the phone, mixing her questions with action. “Whas goin’ on?”

 

Jonathan had already bent to slip on his heavy boots. “Something fell out of the sky over the field. Landed in the back 40.” He had looked up to his wife, much more alert at his words. “Could be nothing. Could be a satilite. Could be…” He had shrugged, and went for the flashlight and the shotgun in the closet under the stairs, loading the gun and resting it broken over his arm when he returned to the kitchen. “I’m gonna go drive the perimeter. If nothing moves I’m gonna go in. And when I find out what it is, then we’ll decide what we’re gonna do.”

 

Martha had blinked at her husband, pushing her hair off her face. She was a beautiful woman, Jonathan had thought in that moment, down below the skin, in her soul. She was never more beautiful than when she was soothing him from his nightmares with her soft words, or squinting at him in frustration at his stubbornness. She was beautiful now, with worry stiffening her shoulders, as she stood resolutely by the phone, ready to trust him to make the right decisions. Ready to trust him, after everything he’d put them through.

 

“Why don’t we just call the cops now, Jonathan?” And Jonathan had sighed and had looked out the window into the darkness and to the dull yellow light flickering in the fields.

 

“I don’t know. Just don’t.”

 

He had looked back at his wife’s grim face and narrowed eyed stare.

 

“Carry your pistol with you, too,” was all she had said.

 

 

 

 

The man who has come out of the field was not human. This is the first thought that stays Jonathan Kent’s hand.

 

Most people probably would have just shot the damn thing, but Jonathan, much like his wife, wasn’t known to take to hysterics and so he just stands next to his open door in his pajamas and boots with his shotgun shoulder-high, staring hard at the figure standing just outside the corn. It had taken almost a half hour of driving up and down the length of the dirt track that bordered his field, but eventually The Alien emerged, just as Jonathan had known deep down that it would.

 

It certainly looks like a human, lit up in the headlights, with its two legs and two hands and two eyes, but Jonathan knows it’s not. Knows it from the strange body suit it’s wearing with the strange symbol and the strange helmet with the clear film top that it’s got on its head.

 

But mostly, he knows it from the way it stares at Taco. The Collie is barking like crazy with her semi-shrill cracks, but her tail is wagging and any human would know that she’s barely holding herself back from asking bodily for some love. The Alien is looking at her with no small amount of trepidation. With an apprehensiveness that’s akin to fear.

 

It takes a minute of silent showdown between the men before Jonathan relents. The Alien has had its hands out at its sides in a non-threatening gesture since it emerged from the cornfield, and Jonathan doesn’t see where it could be hiding a weapon anyway. He lowers his shotgun and grabs Taco by the collar, giving her a slight shake. “Quiet, Taco! Quiet!” After a moment, she settles down and whines, wanting so bad to go up and greet the thing standing just twenty feet away. Jonathan considers letting her, for a moment.

 

It takes another moment of staring at each other before Jonathan asks, loudly, “There any more of you?” It’s stupid, he knows as he says it, because the likeliness of an alien that just crash landed in his field knowing English is zero, but he doesn’t know what else to do.

 

Unsurprisingly, The Alien gives him a helpless look and then turns slightly to the cornfield. It points and speaks shortly, but Jonathan is sure that he’s never heard any language like it. Instead, he points to himself, then the field, and repeats the motion, saying, “You want me to go in there?” He’s not sure that he gets his point across, but The Alien makes a beckoning gesture anyway and starts back into the corn.

 

Jonathan hesitates a moment before breaking his shotgun again and following it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It takes about fifteen minutes stumbling in the dark with the flashlight to find the ship The Alien landed in, but the flickering fire on the surrounding corn stalks light their goal, and Jonathan sends up a quick prayer of thanks that it hasn’t been a dry season and his whole field has caught. He sees the singed and trampled stalks where someone has made an effort to put out the smoldering flames and he feels a sharp stab of gratitude.

 

He has his second thought then, standing next to the deep scar that the crashed ship has made, and he knows he’s going to do what he can to help this alien. This person.

 

The Alien approaches his ship, really a large capsule, and leans inside. Taco follows curiously, sniffing at the singed edges and wags enthusiastically at whatever is there inside the compartment. Jonathan hears only the soft exchange of voices in the same gibberish as before and The Alien is turning, beckoning, and Jonathan has no choice but to come closer and shine his light inside.

 

What looks like a female of the species raises her hand to shield her face from the light, and Jonathan lowers the beam to her lap, apologizing. But the words die in his throat as he sees the small bundle there with what looks like a small oxygen canister pressed over its nose and mouth, and there’s no denying that a small alien family has just crashed into his cornfield.

 

“My God,” Jonathan breathes, transfixed, and it’s about that time the baby in her lap starts to wail through its mask, disturbed by the light shining in its eyes. He flicks the light away quickly and looks up with another apology on his lips, but he recognizes then the fact that the woman wears no helmet like the man and has a pained, strained look upon her face.

 

“Aw, hell,” he swears, and looks up at the man who is watching him coolly. His eyes are sharp, intelligent, and Jonathan knows, certain, that he is being evaluated. But there’s something else there as well that Jonathan can’t yet identify.

 

It’s Taco who breaks the moment, leaning in and beginning to lick the fussing bundle. The woman bravely pushes the dog away with her hand, but gets her own kisses, and it takes Jonathan yanking her back by the collar to stop her. “Alright, then,” he says, sighing. “Let’s get you three inside.”

 

 

 

 

Jonathan hears the crash as he approaches the steps to the kitchen, the woman supported between him and the man. Martha appears at the screen door, mouth agape.

 

“What in the name of the Lord is this, Jonathan?” she asks, holding the screen door open as they shuffle in. There were always manners to fall back on.

 

They settle the woman into a chair and Jonathan sees the coffee pot shattered on the floor, steaming brown liquid splattered everywhere. Martha seems torn between gaping at their visitors and reaching for the dishrag to clean up, so Jonathan gets the broom from the pantry and starts sweeping. No need for someone to cut themselves tonight of all nights.

 

“I found them in the cornfield. Whatever ship they came in crashed there.” It’s a mark of how odd the night is that they don’t even have to shoo Taco away from the mess on the floor. She instead has her snout buried in the bundle that still sits in the woman’s lap, sniffing and wagging. The man has cautiously pulled another chair around and has perched himself on it, staring curiously at the dog. He’s abandoned his helmet, giving it instead to the woman, who still looks pained and injured. His breathing has become labored and obviously painful, but he doesn’t seem to be suffering as much as she had been.

 

“What do you mean, ‘ship’?” Martha asks from her knees where she’s mopping up coffee. “‘Crashed here’? Like in a plane?”

 

Jonathan just looks at her, then pointedly at the family at the kitchen table, and then back, and Martha gives him a wild eyed stare. She’s being purposefully dense, he knows, trying for plausible deniability, and he can’t give her any. There’s a proverbial elephant in the room, pressing in on their chests and suffocating them, and neither can figure how to shoo it away.

 

After a few minutes of awkward silence they manage to gesture and coax the family into a hastily made-up guestroom. Martha, God love her, makes an awkward, stilted attempt to explain the purpose of the bathroom, and the Kents retire to their room not entirely sure that they got their point across.

 

There is no sleep that night, as they lay in the dark holding each other close.

 

 

 

 

II.

 

The next day is Sunday, and at this more than any other time they need the reassurance of the Lord, so they rise from their not-sleep and ready themselves. Martha makes too many eggs and ham and leaves the pan on the stove with the cover over it.

 

They’re silent in the truck as they make their way to the church. Friends and neighbors greet them without mentioning the dark circles under their eyes, and Jonathan is, for the one and only time, grateful that gossip about his nightmares had spread like wildfire a couple of years ago.

 

Church is warm, and crowded, and Jonathan works hard to focus on the sermon and push the rest of it to the back of his mind. It gives him some small measure of peace, a sort of meditation, and he files out of the church with the rest of the throng with no answers, but less strain.

 

They stop by the general store on the way home and buy diapers and powder and wipes. They debate back and forth about buying baby food and realize that they have neither any idea how old the child is nor when children should start to eat the soft food. They eventually settle on buying formula and bottles and a couple of pacifiers, and they attempt to be as casual as possible as they check out.

 

“You two got somethin’ you wanna share with the rest of us?” Susan Helms asks with a pointed look. The Kent’s infertility had been much tsked and awwed over after Patty Nolan had weaseled it out of Martha and spread it through the sewing circles. Luckily, Jonathan had been thinking of a lie since they entered the store.

 

“Just some cousins in from out of town, Susan, nothing to get excited over.”

 

They haggle their way out of the store (“Out of town cousins?” “By marriage.” “How long they stayin’ for?” “Oh, we’re not sure yet.”) and into the truck, confident that by the end of the day everyone in town will have come to their own conclusions. It’s a community, this small farm town, full of fundamentally good and well-meaning people, but spiked through with the kind of small-town southern social norms that kept the Kents on their farm most of the time.

 

Jonathan has been grateful for a lot in the last twelve hours, and their status as ‘the odd couple’ of Smallville joins that list as they head home.

 

 

 

 

The house is quiet when they come in, and Taco is still lying in the hallway across from the closed guestroom. She whines at them as they approach laden down with bags, and Jonathan knows she’s eager to go in and continue her inspection of these new creatures. He takes pity on the both of them and ushers Taco outside.

 

“Go on, now, go lay down,” he says as she is unwillingly nudged onto the porch by his boot. “They don’t want you, you nuisance. Get!” He shuts the screen on her forlorn look and ignores the few barks at his retreating back.

 

Upstairs he finds Martha hovering awkwardly in the doorway, wearing a strained smile and holding the diapers out for the woman to inspect. Jonathan gently nudges her forward until she’s standing next to the bed and he looks around the room. It’s unchanged but for the full-sized bed has now been pushed into the corner under the window, and the blankets and pillows have been piled up into a small nest. Jonathan wonders briefly how he didn’t hear the bed being moved last night as they lay awake down the hallway.

 

The baby, a boy Jonathan can now see, lies on its back asleep in a ray of sunlight. His canister of air lies next to him, unused, and his breathing is labored. He’s a cute thing, and looks human in every way. So does the woman, with her thick, wavy dark hair and handsome features. She’s dressed in the same long, heavy robes and mask as she was wearing the night before, and he can see how pale and clammy she is. She’s holding the diapers in her hand and smiling back the best she can, but it’s obvious that she’s still suffering. Jonathan thinks of giving her aspirin but he’s afraid of killing her.

 

“Where’s your husband?” he asks instead, looking around and making exaggerated searching motions. She seems to get what he’s trying for, or at least he hopes she does, and points out the window, towards the cornfields. Jonathan gets a little silly at what he thinks is a successful communication, and he’s in a much better place after church, so he makes a diving motion with his hand and crashes it into the other one, complete with sound effects. Martha gapes at him, horrified, but the alien smiles at him and makes what sounds like a small laugh, nodding.

 

Jonathan can’t help but smile back.

 

He leaves the two women to it, kissing Martha on the cheek and squeezing her hand before he goes.

 

                                                                                                 

 

 

Taco waits until the tractor has come to a stop to bound out and greet the alien, but only barely. Jonathan was loathe to mow down his corn crop, but he realizes that if he doesn’t move this ship and fill in the hole his farmhands are going to be asking questions come Monday that he doesn’t have answers for.

 

He steps down to find the man sitting cross-legged in the dirt next to the capsule, giving Taco some awkward pats. Spread around him are odds and ends salvaged from the ship. It’s not much, and Jonathan realizes that whatever brought these people here must have been abrupt and painful. He wonders for a moment if they’re escaped criminals, but he lets that thought go. Jonathan’s a man who trusts his instincts, and his instincts aren’t sending up anymore red flags than would be normal in this situation.

 

Jonathan snorts. As if anything is going to be ‘normal’ anymore.

 

The sound causes the man to look up at him, squinting into the sun, and he smiles at Jonathan, kindly. He lets Taco leave him to poke around inside the capsule and looks at the things piled around. He spreads his hands to gesture at it all, and shrugs, and Jonathan knows what he’s trying to say.

 

 _Here it is,_ he’s saying, _here’s my whole life._

 

Jonathan points to the capsule, then to his tractor, then waves his hand in the general direction of the barn. When the man doesn’t move he grabs a shovel and a chain from where he had stashed them and uses them to gesture. The man stands, and approaches cautiously, reaching out to grab the shovel.

 

“You know,” Jonathan finally tries, hooking the chain around what looks like one of the engines and pulling. “We gotta move this thing. Can’t leave it here.”

 

The man nods in what looks like a cautious sort of understanding, but then he looks down at the shovel and back in clear confusion. He wiggles it, asking a question in his gibberish language.

 

“It’s a shovel,” Jonathan says automatically, and then reaches over and takes it from him, holding it level and looking at him. “Shovel.” He walks over to the capsule and shovels some dirt away from where it has been buried in the earth by its impact. “You dig stuff. Dirt.” He hands the shovel back to the alien and then grabs another one. Best to teach by example, after all, and there’s no way he’s going to dig this thing out by himself.

 

After a few moments of digging he sees the alien start to clumsily copy him and he grins in spite of everything.

 

“You’ve never done a day of work in your life, have you?” he asks, and the alien across from him smiles back, and keeps digging.

 

 

 

 

Jonathan admits to being impressed when the alien figures out how to get the ship into the underbarn.

 

Jonathan had tried a couple of aborted attempts to build a ramp to slide the ship down before the alien had touched his arm, gently, and pointed towards the bench that sat against the wall of the barn. Jonathan had sat, still surprised enough at this first order given that he didn’t protest.

 

So he sits, obediently, and watches as the alien crawls all over his barn setting up a rope and pulley system. Jonathan isn’t exactly stupid but he’s able enough to admit that it might have taken him a few failures to come up with this one, and then how to execute it. The man is quick to come up with a plan. And Jonathan’s pleased to realize that he’s learning a bit more about his visitor, that he might have been an engineer or architect or scientist on his home world.

 

He takes back, silently, the insinuation that this man has never worked a day in his life.

 

The man comes down from the rafters finally and sits heavily next to Jonathan, wheezing and coughing, and Jonathan is struck again at how difficult breathing is for him. They had stopped often during their labors in the field for the man’s crippling coughing fits to pass, and Jonathan had hovered at first, awkwardly, with water and concern. He doesn’t understand why they didn’t bring more than one helmet to wear, but then again he doesn’t understand why they’re here in the first place.

 

“You alright?” Jonathan asks, like always, and the man shocks him when he looks over, and smiles, and states, “Yallrite.”

 

Jonathan laughs in shock, and grabs the alien’s shoulder and then laughs at the absurdity of the situation. The situation where an alien has come down from the heavens and is sitting next to him in his barn trying to speak English. The situation where any second the men in black are going to pound down his door and hustle this little refugee family off his farm. And he doesn’t know what to do so he laughs out all his tension into the dying day and hopes…

 

And hopes.

 

“That’s not… Well. You tried,” he says eventually, and drops his hand back to his thigh. A light touch makes him look up at the man next to him who has a hand pressed to his breast.

 

“Jorell,” he says, firmly and with meaning. Jonathan copies his pose.

 

“Jonathan,” he replies, and they smile.

 

 

 

 

III.

 

The first couple weeks are awkward and painful and exhilarating.

 

Jonathan explains, to his farmhand’s disgust, about the drunken teenagers who drove through the cornfields, burning and tearing up crop and digging in the field, and they spend a good part of the week smoothing out the land and composting the destroyed corn crops. When Jonathan goes into town next the sheriff approaches him at the feed and tack and asks why he didn’t report the vandalism.

 

“Oh, you know, Bob. What were you gonna do anyway? Check the tire tracks?”

 

Bob Tidrick laughs and slaps him heartily on the back. “Alright, alright, point taken. Still, those damn kids need to learn some respect for honest folk like you, Jonathan.”

 

Jonathan shrugs and hefts his chicken feed over his shoulder. “The day I catch ‘em in the act, you’ll be sure to get a phone call, Bob.”

 

Jorell is, thankfully, discreet, and he splits his time between the underbarn and the guest bedroom. Jonathan pokes his head in one night before dinner to see him buried in a large metal contraption opened up on the bedroom floor, its insides scattered around. Laura Lorvin is sitting propped up in bed, helmet securely on, reading to him from what looks like a moving tablet. Figures and shapes spring up from it into the air and melt back down.

 

Jonathan reminds himself that he needs to figure out a way to explain the lock and that they can use it.

 

Laura is the first to greet him. “Hello,” she says, smiling as best she can. Her pain is obvious, and she has spent her days before this point shuffling from the bathroom to the bed to the kitchen when she can. While Jorell still wheezes and coughs, and even little Kallel’s breathing is labored, they still function, if painfully. Laura is weak and pale, and Jonathan worries about her at night when he lays awake in the darkness.

 

“Hi,” he replies, smiling warmly. “Dinner’s ready.”

 

 

 

 

Dinner is an experience, always, even if none of them understand what’s going on.

 

It’s awkward at first, eating in silence and staring at each other across the table. Laura Lorvin is the first to break the impasse, finally, conducting a conversation with Jorell and ignoring the Kents. Her dismissal exposes, to Jonathan, the futility of a mannered silence and so he follows suit with Martha. They come to an unspoken agreement, the four of them, that they won’t hold anyone to niceties when they have no way of communicating. That’s how Jonathan words it in his head anyway.

 

It’s the days that Laura doesn’t join them, her pain and sickness too great, that are the worst, and Jorell makes a sad sight on his side of the table, alone. Martha takes to playing the radio on those nights, and Jonathan amuses himself by watching the expressions he makes at the music he hears.

 

On the occasions Laura does join them for meals the Kents struggle with her breastfeeding Kallel at the table. They learn to ignore it, forcing themselves into relaxed, measured conversation, but they confide their embarrassment to each other at night, in bed. They feel helpless to stop it.

 

Martha pulls out all the stops, baking and frying and boiling, and Jonathan quips that more aliens should land in the backyard if this is what it gets him. It’s the first, tentative joke made about the situation, and they struggle for a second before Martha slaps his chest and tells him aliens are no excuse to take advantage.

 

He has to, though, because their guests don’t eat very much, and Jonathan can see Martha’s struggle to beat down her ingrained sensibilities and let it go. They both understand that the food, while apparently eatable, is probably nothing like these aliens have ever experienced, and Jonathan is obvious enough in his enjoyment that Martha has to roll her eyes in exasperation and tell him to keep it down. They do notice, however, that sweet things get devoured immediately, so Martha makes sure to serve fruit salads and mashed yams drizzled with brown sugar.

 

Their guests notice the effort, and the first time Jorell stutters out an uncertain, “Thank you,” while gesturing towards the candied almonds Martha drops the serving spoon in a pot of chili.

 

They pick up words and phrases in those first weeks, hellos and thank yous and oks. They catch on pretty quickly about the schedule on the farm, learning what ‘dinner’s ready’ and ‘do you want some lunch’ means, and while they don’t join in the work they make themselves scarce and silent when guests and farmhands are around. They rise early and stay up late, and all the while murmur back and forth in their strange language.

 

It’s a bizarre existence to get used to, but after a while Jonathan starts using Jorell quietly slipping out to the barn as a signal that it’s time to get up and start his morning.

 

 

 

 

The nightmares come back one night, when he’s finally able to once again fall into a deep enough sleep, and Jonathan wakes with a start, arms protecting his face from the blast that never comes. Martha sits up half-way, a question on her lips, and Jonathan soothes her back down.

 

“I sneezed,” he lies, and she’s sleep addled enough to believe him.

 

He slips out after a few minutes of lying awake to find the light on in the kitchen. Laura Lorvin is sitting at the table in a borrowed nightshirt, making thick black lines on a legal pad. Taco is sprawled on the floor in front of the refrigerator, and Jonathan realizes how hot the nights have become. It’s early July and it’s humid, and he realizes that it’s a small wonder the nightmares have begun to plague him again. The thought makes him sigh and he sets to making coffee.

 

“Can’t sleep?” he asks Laura, and she smiles at him, but barely pauses in her sketching of what looks like buildings.

 

He sits down across from her to wait and after a few minutes she slides over another notepad, filled with drawings. Jonathan flips through to see cityscapes with impossibly tall towers, and landscapes filled with jagged rocks and deep canyons. There are fantastic creatures rendered in precise detail, and schematics of ladybug-shaped ships and what looks like a wickedly sharp tripod. Towards the end there’s a sketch of who Jonathan recognizes as Jorell, constructing the capsule in his barn with the help of what looks like robots.

 

“These are amazing,” Jonathan says, looking up at the woman across from him. She smiles at him again, kindly, and Jonathan hopes he can convey with his face what his words can’t. He presses a hand down on top of the pad and looks her straight in the eye.

 

“Amazing.”

 

She places her own hand on top of the pad and looks at him just as intently.

 

“Krypton.”

 

 

 

 

“What are we doing, Jonathan?”

 

Martha asks him one night, finally, with her no-nonsense face and her blunt eyes. Jonathan looks away from her and keeps drying the dishes, struggling.

 

It’s been almost three weeks, and they’ve both successfully avoided thinking of the future. It’s hard enough to imagine there could be one, with the constant fear of a knock at the door hanging over their heads. The week before the mailman had showed up unexpectedly to hand deliver a package. It had shaken Martha so badly she had collapsed in the sitting room and cried silently for twenty minutes.

 

“We can’t keep this up,” she starts, and Jonathan puts down the plate and presses his hands against the sink, shoulders hunched.

 

“Keep what up?”

 

She throws her hands in the air, a frustration boiling up in her that is edging slowly to anger. “Whatever it is we’re doing! Sheltering aliens! Hiding a spaceship in the barn! What if something happens? What if someone sees something, or finds out?” Martha turns around and places a hand over her mouth. There’s a tense moment of silence before she turns back. “What if something happens to us, Jonathan? What will happen then? And what if something happens to one of them? What if they get sick, or get _us_ sick?”

 

Jonathan doesn’t look up from the dishes in the sink, but her questions drag up a not so hypothetical issue. Laura Lorvin’s poor health hasn’t exactly worsened, but it hasn’t gotten better either. Unlike her husband and son, who have slowly adapted, she still cannot breathe. They can hear her at all hours of the night, coughing and hacking, and she stays in bed as often as she comes down for meals. Martha has become a sort of surrogate mother for Kallel, feeding and changing and bathing him when Laura cannot seem to get up the strength to do so. Jorell spends as much time as possible in the room with her, and Jonathan can see the tightness in his face.

 

“What do you want to do, Martha?” Jonathan finally asks. “You want to call the cops? Turn them over to the government?”

 

Martha grips the sink next to him. The clock ticks in the silence. “No,” she says, decisively, after a long moment. “No, I do not.”

 

It ruins the confrontation that Jonathan was expecting, and he looks up at her. He doesn’t say it, but he’s sure she knows how badly he wanted her to say yes. To force the issue, to have the argument between what is right and what is easy. To force them both to the inescapable conclusion. To free them both.

 

He decides to have it anyway. “What’s our alternative, then? We keep them here? We feed them and clothe them? We can’t even talk to them, and we don’t know if we ever will. What if this is the way it stays? With them hiding in the guest bedroom and us struggling to keep it up?” He pushes up and turns to face her. “We can’t do that, Martha, we can’t. We can’t-”

 

And then Jonathan swallows past the lump in his throat and forces his voice out past his own guilt and pride. “I can’t. It’s my fault, all of this. That they’re here, that we’re here. I can’t make you stay here and suffer because of my bad choices, because of my stubbornness. Because I said don’t call the cops. Because I-”

 

Jonathan feels the burning behind his eyes and blinks rapidly. He thinks about how Martha never wanted to stay on the farm, how she wanted to be a paralegal in Wichita and live on the same street as her sister. He thinks about his own pain and fear that kept them here, in the house his grandfather built and on the land he inherited when none of his brothers wanted it. He thinks about his decision to buy more land and the drought that followed. He thinks about the dreams that Martha had and the joy she once shined with and he thinks about the stress that lines her beautiful face now. He thinks about every time he’s failed and inside he rails against himself for not being able to let her go, for dragging her down with him.

 

But Martha is there, like she always is, and her cool hands pull his face down to rest on her shoulder. “Shhhhh,” she coos, soothing. “Shhhhh.” And they stay like that for a long time, breathing and holding each other.

 

“Jonathan Kent,” she says finally, “I love you. And you couldn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do any more than make the sun rise in the west.”

 

 

 

 

IV.

 

It’s an early Thursday afternoon when the wind kicks up and the clouds start to gather and Jonathan knows. He can feel it in his bones, can feel it from a lifetime of working under the Kansas sun.

 

He calls all the farmhands in and he sees the worry lining the faces of the ones with families. “Go on,” he says, grabbing tools from them as they rush past the barn towards their trucks. “Go home, get under cover.”

 

“Are we gonna make it?” Ryan Declerc asks him as he throws his tools into the barn, his young face betraying a deep panic. Jonathan feels it too. The late storm came on quick. Quicker than he’s ever seen it in 30 years.

 

“You’ll make it, go,” he replies, and Ryan runs the devil down to get to his car.

 

It takes Jonathan a while longer to be satisfied that everything in the barn is locked down, and when he emerges he can hear the sirens going off in town, their mournful wails carrying on the wind. The sky above him has begun to turn a foul black, shooting down a harsh rain, and he rushes over to the house and up the steps, his heart in his throat.

 

Martha’s got the radio on and the broadcaster’s terse warning is coming in through the static. He enters to see her thundering down the stairs with a crying Kalell in her arms and the baby bag over her shoulder. Taco is standing in the kitchen, barking loudly.

 

“Where’s Jorell and Laura?” he demands, shouting to be heard over the cacophony.

 

Martha struggles to answer him, smothering Kallel to her chest. “Quiet!” she shouts at Taco, “Quiet!” She finally looks over and Jonathan can see the panic. “They’re upstairs, he won’t leave that stupid project of his!”

 

Jonathan shakes his head. “Get in the cellar with Kallel and Taco, go!” he orders, and Martha doesn’t hesitate. She moves quickly into the kitchen and slaps a leash on Taco, a lifetime of Kansas living coloring her movements.

 

Jonathan takes the stairs two at a time, and when he reaches the guestroom he can see Laura Lorvin in the doorway, can hear her yelling at her husband. Jonathan doesn’t know what she’s saying, and he doesn’t care. All he sees is Jorell on his knees on the floor, hastily packing all the bolts and tools he’s had scattered around into a messenger bag. All he can think is, _That damn fool is going to get himself killed!_

 

“Come on, we’ve got to go!” he shouts, and he reaches over to grab Jorell around his upper arm. But Jorell jerks away and suddenly Jonathan is being pulled forward, thrown, flipped, and he ends up on his back on the bed, his feet straight up in the air, looking at Jorell and Laura’s shocked faces upside down. Jorell looks at his arm and then back to Jonathan, flabbergasted.

 

Jonathan scrambles to right himself, and for a moment, the three of them can only stare at each other.

 

Then the house shifts with an almighty creak, and Laura screams softly in surprise. Jonathan comes back to himself, and he jumps up. He steps over the metal carcass in the middle of the floor and grabs Laura, hustling her out the door and towards the stairs. She resists only to shout something at her husband and then she’s letting herself be led, leaning heavily on Jonathan. He half carries her down the stairs and then drags her through the kitchen and out the back door. Around the side of the house the storm cellar doors are open, and Martha’s head pokes out as they approach.

 

“Where’s Jorell?” she shouts

**Author's Note:**

> Wherein I make my excuses:
> 
> Hi, hello. You made it. Excellent. I'm sorry to leave you like this. The good news is, if you're thoroughly enthralled (wooo), AO3 has this handy dandy little "subscribe" feature, so you can get an email months from now when I finish this and you can go, "Oh, hey, wow. I. Wait, what's this?" and become reacquainted with this particular imagining of the SuperOrigin.
> 
> I started writing this fic on a whim after seeing the movie four times, and I was certainly enthused at the time. I just happened to find inspiration at a bad time in my life: I was moving to China and trying to wrap up my American life which, you perhaps will not be surprised to learn, is no small thing. Now, months later, I'm again inspired to write at a bad time, starting a new job and hashing out visas. I suppose it's some consolation to myself - and perhaps you dear reader - that I at least will not be moving again.
> 
> But, as I noted above, I am thoroughly determined to finish this fic before I once again jump the fandom ship. And there IS a light at the end of the tunnel for me: in a couple of weeks my fate will be sealed for better or worse, and then the act of writing the thing will actually boil down to finding the time. And I'm stubborn. It'll get there. Until then, though, you're left with this half-finished thing, dumped here because I needed an ego boost while fighting Chinese visa authorities.
> 
> <3


End file.
